In 1995, established EarthWeb a company dedicated to the needs of tech professionals. Jack co-founded the company with Murray Hidary and Nova Spivack. Jack led the company from its inception through three rounds of investment and then its IPO. Under Jack’s leadership, EarthWeb acquired Dice.com, a website that connects users with jobs, and other sites dedicated to the needs of IT professionals. As Chairman and CEO of the public company, Jack continued to grow the company and engage with shareholders, customers and analysts. (NYSE: DHX) www.dice.com

Jack now serves as Senior Advisor to X Labs, the advanced innovation lab of Alphabet/Google. www.solveforx.com In his current role, Jack focuses on the marketplace scaling of X Lab innovations.

Jack is the co-founder and Chairman of Samba Energy, a leading marketplace for commercial solar projects and financing. Samba’s marketplace has driven down the cost of commercial solar and thus increased the ROI for companies using the market for their solar programs. www.sambaenergy.com

Committed to community and philanthropic causes, he has received several industry and community awards as well as being recognized as a Global Leader of Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum, Davos. He is also a founding member of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). CGI was founded by Bill Clinton to bring government together with the private sector and non-profits to solve the big problems of our day. He serves on several boards including the X Prize Foundation www.xprize.org

Jack studied philosophy and neuroscience at Columbia University and was awarded a Stanley Fellowship in Clinical Neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Under the fellowship, he conducted research on the use of neural networks to model and analyze the data in functional neuroimaging using techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study brain states.

Jack was born in the Ocean Parkway Sephardic community near Coney Island. Jack’s great-grandparents came to Ellis Island as immigrants, living in the Lower East Side tenements. Jack’s great-grandfather, Moses Hidary, worked as both a barber and teacher.

In the 1920’s and 30’s Jack’s grandfather Jack Hidary was peddling tablecloths and together with his son Moe founded the family business that is seventy years old and continues to thrive in the garment district. His grandfather moved the family to Brooklyn and co-founded the community that continues to thrive there today. Jack was born at Brookdale Hospital in Brownsville and he and his parents spent his first year living in his grandmother’s house. The family then shared a two-family home with their uncle and aunt before moving to their own house near PS 215 where Jack’s father had attended school. Jack grew up with strong role models and small business owners in a community where everyone had an open door.

Jack’s father, David Hidary, joined the family business and is a very active community member dedicated to education and social services. Jack’s father was president of the local school for 20 years. Jack’s mother is head of the Orange Dance Program, a non-profit program for girls in memory of Mariel Hidary. The family shared a two-family home with their uncle and aunt upstairs before moving to their own house near PS 215 where Jack’s father had attended school.

Jack is the oldest of four brothers and a sister, Mariel Hidary, who was tragically killed at the age of 23 in a traffic accident in 2006. In Jack’s community, it’s family first: the first-born is trained to be a leader and take care of the family. Surrounded by strong role models, Jack learned the importance of public service. He saw best practices and started bringing them to other communities.

In 1998, Jack and his brother Murray took their company public when Jack was 30 years old. From the tenements of the lower east side to the floor of the stock exchange is only a few minutes away and yet connects ninety years of the Hidary family history.

March 03, 2017

The Hidary Foundation has now launched several tech education pilot programs across several schools in New York & New Jersey. We are pioneering a new model for k-12 tech education based on immersive bootcamp-style programs, with a special focus on propelling girls into a currently underrepresented tech ecosystem. Aside from routinely advising these schools on strategies for efficient long term tech education, we have hired instructors, sourced best curricula, and contributed funds for these bootcamps.

In addition, the Hidary Foundation has funded robotics teams at various schools and have arranged for their participation in US First.

We will be holding several more assemblies & events geared towards preparing our youth for this ever changing job climate. The time to get ahead of the curve is now.

For more information on how to bring PowerForward, an initiative of the Hidary Foundation, to your school, contact joe@hidaryfoundation.org

As many of you know, our family, like so many others, has been touched by cancer- while our father continues to stay a few steps ahead of the disease, we are driven as a family towards a cure for all cancer patients.

October 04, 2015

If you want to bring the next 3 billion people on the net and into the financial system start with women entrepreneurs. More than 85% of all microfinance loans go to women - these women are often the primary breadwinners in their households.

Today we came together with Mastercard, TATA, Softbank Brightstar, Kiva, Trickle Up and others to empower these women with smartphones - these phones will include digital money software as well as apps to sell their wares on Etsy and other marketplaces. This is a gamechanger.

December 03, 2013

Melanoma Research Alliance and the Hidary Foundation Fund Research Study of Melanoma Genomics

Scientific Investigators at 5 Institutions Receive $1 Million to Spur Better Outcomes for Patients with Acral Melanoma and Provide Breakthroughs Through the Use of Genome Sequencing

December 03, 2013 10:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Melanoma Research Alliance (MRA), the leading private funder of melanoma research, and the Hidary Foundation, the philanthropic arm of technology entrepreneur Jack Hidary and his family, today announced a new research program with researchers at five institutions comprising a groundbreaking study of the genetics of acral melanoma. Two Team Science Awards will fund new work at Kaiser Permanente Research Institute, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and Vanderbilt University. The awards total $1 million and are jointly awarded by the MRA and the Hidary Foundation.

“This partnership with the Hidary Foundation underscores the need for further research into melanoma, and especially melanoma subtypes such as acral melanoma, in order to develop more effective treatment options for all melanoma patients.”

Melanoma is an aggressive form of skin cancer and one of the fastest growing cancers in the U.S. This study will focus on acral melanoma which is a subtype of the cancer that typically forms on the palms of the hands, soles of the feet, or under the fingernails and has a 10-20% lower survival rate than non-acral cutaneous melanoma. These studies will delve into the genetic drivers of acral melanoma, insight that is crucially needed to better understand how new advances in cutaneous melanoma treatment can be applied to acral patients.

The cost of genomic sequencing has come down significantly. Five years ago, it would have cost millions of dollars to perform whole genome sequencing on a few dozen patients. Today the cost is down to a few thousand dollars per individual, and sequencing can be performed in days. This enables researchers to now use sequencing to measure tumor-specific alterations in chromosome structure, point-mutations and gene expression via a combination of whole genome, whole exome and RNA sequencing.

“We have made significant progress in the fight against melanoma since the MRA was founded in 2007,” said Debra Black, Co-Founder and Chair of the Melanoma Research Alliance. “This partnership with the Hidary Foundation underscores the need for further research into melanoma, and especially melanoma subtypes such as acral melanoma, in order to develop more effective treatment options for all melanoma patients.”

“Despite recent progress in defining the genetic basis of cutaneous melanoma, comprehensive studies are lacking in patients with acral melanoma. These two Team Science Awards bring together the diverse expertise needed to define in all patients the underlying cause of this disease. The insights gained will likely lead to future personalized treatment approaches,” said David B. Solit, MD, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Chairman of MRA’s Grant Review Committee.

“Genetic sequencing has decreased significantly in cost and time and can now be used as a critical tool to investigate cancer, and based on our experiences in technology, we believe that whole exome and whole genome sequencing of larger sets of patients may be key to new breakthroughs in the fight against cancer,” said Jack Hidary, Chairman of the Hidary Foundation. “Our partnership with the Melanoma Research Alliance will advance this important work on melanoma. The key to genomic studies is not just sequencing, but the analysis of the data. These teams will focus on unraveling the genetic signature of this cancer, and this will extend their work to other cancers as we collectively build greater genomic capabilities.”

The Hidary family’s interest in acral melanoma was spurred by the discovery and successful treatment of the family’s patriarch, David J. Hidary.

Recipients of these competitive Team Science Awards include one team led by Maryam Asgari, MD, MPH, of the Kaiser Permanente Research Institute that also includes multiple researchers from UCSF. Members of the second team, led by Jeffrey Sosman, MD, of Vanderbilt University, include investigators from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and TGen.

With these latest awards, MRA has now awarded more than $49 million to leading researchers seeking to better treat, prevent, detect, and stage melanoma. Due to the ongoing support of its founders, MRA devotes 100% of every dollar raised to melanoma research. MRA’s rigorous peer-review process ensures that the organization’s research dollars are allocated to projects with the potential to affect near-term improvements in the paradigm of care.

About the Hidary Foundation

The Hidary Foundation catalyzes positive change in several sectors. The Foundation has a focus on promoting innovative K-12 educational programs, particularly those that focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and those that use project-based learning approaches. The Foundation has also supported the promotion of entrepreneurship both through programs that support microfinance focusing on low-income individuals who wish to start companies as well as youth entrepreneurship. The members of the Hidary family are all entrepreneurs in fields ranging from technology and clean energy to real estate, fashion and education.

The Foundation’s work on cancer will focus on the use of emerging tools such as genomic sequencing in the fight against cancer. This study with the MRA will be supported by members of the Hidary family including David and Aimee Hidary, Jack Hidary, Murray Hidary, Richard and Esther Hidary, and Michael and Sarah Hidary.

About the Melanoma Research Alliance

MRA is a public charity formed in 2007 under the auspices of the Milken Institute, with the generous founding support of Debra and Leon Black. MRA is poised to build on recent momentum in the field, accelerating the pace of scientific discovery and translation in order to eliminate suffering and death due to melanoma. To date, MRA has supported the research of 171 investigators at 80 institutions in 14 countries. MRA’s ability to fund wide-ranging research in melanoma is amplified by unique multi-faceted collaborations and partnerships with individuals, private foundations and corporations. Visit www.curemelanoma.org for more information.

October 31, 2013

This robotics team wanted to figure out a way to send a flying robot into an area with a lot of obstacles and have it get through those obsticles WITHOUT the use of sophisticated avoicance technology. Check out their clever solution and the amazing results:

From Bangladesh to NYC, microfinance is having a profound impact on so many lives - particlulary women who are empowered to start and build their own businesses. Check out this piece on how to take this forward